Author P. M. Hejl

Peter M. Hejl is adjunct professor at the University of Siegen, where until 2010 he taught sociology, especially sociology of communication and media. He first worked as a researcher at the FeoLL research center of the state of North-Rhine/Westphalia. In 1984 Hejl moved to the “Institute of empirical studies in literature and media” (LUMIS) (later, Institut für Medienforschung) at the University of Siegen. His work is based on the conviction that the social sciences are mislead if they continue the tradition of disciplinary autonomy, which results in the exclusion of, e.g., psychological and biological knowledge from brain research and evolutionary theory. Hejl contributed to the integration of the theory of autopoiesis (Maturana) and the development of a radical constructivist approach to knowledge, communication and social systems through contributions to topics such as the self-organization and self-regulation of social systems. Parallel to this theoretical work, he designed and conducted empirical studies on the use of media.

Excerpt: In “developed” as well as in still “developing” countries “society” is, for many people, an important object of reflection and discussion. Turning to science, however, we find a somewhat different picture, namely, that “society” has, without any further specification, more or less become the “property” of the sociologists. Its political aspect con­cerns the political scientists, the linguists deal with language and communication and related social phenomena, whereas the historians are responsible for what is known about past societies. The individual, finally, is the “property” of the psychologists. This situation is the result of a process of differentiation to make the scientific enterprise more efficient through greater specialisation. Nevertheless, and this is my starting point, there is no consensus between sociologists as to how “society” can be described, and hence be understood, in a scientific way.

Hejl P. M. (1981) The definition of system and the problem of the observer: The example of the theory of society. In: Roth G. & Schwegler H. (eds.) Self-organizing systems. An interdisciplinary approach. Campus, Frankfurt: 170–185. Fulltext at https://cepa.info/3734

First of all I shall outline functional-structural systems theory as an example of one of the most important system-theoretical approaches in present sociology. Then I shall point out some of its drawbacks and try to show that these are caused by the fact that the problems of the definition of system and of the observer have not been adequately considered. I shall finally outline a few considerations based on the theory of autopoietic systems and demonstrate them by means of an example.

When Talcott Parsons started to think and write on Social Systems in the early fifties of the 20th century he resuscitated the much older conflict between the natural sciences and the social sciences. One aspect of this conflict results from the fact that the social sciences are relatively young. As they had and have to compete, at least to a certain degree, with established or accepted disciplines, they tended to claim their independence at the level of both concepts and methods. As a consequence, cooperation with neighbor disciplines became difficult up to the definition of what might character “neighbor” disciplines. The present paper tries to overcome this situation. (I) A view of science based on a reintegration of recent work on cognition / epistemology, theory of science and social theory is proposed. The next step then (II) presents and discusses the theory of autopoietic systems as a new approach for the social sciences. (III) Analyzing the system concept as proposed by Niklas Luhmann in his functional-structural systems theory, problems of the current sociological systems theory are identified and discussed. Then a way is proposed (IV) that shows how a system in the sense of the functional-structural systems theory can be constructed in the context of the theory of autopoietic systems that allows us to avoid the identified problems. The following chapter (V) discusses aspects of one of the most important means of social interaction, language. Part (VI) resumes very briefly the main arguments.

The defenders of an evolutionary approach to management refer among others to 2nd order cybernetics. In doing so, they attempt to advance our understanding of living systems and their organization as proposed by the actually most interesting approach in systems theory. However, the state of this discussion shows that the innovative potential of this approach has not yet been exploited systematically enough. This critique together with some initial considerations on how the “application” might look like is the subject of the article. After a short presentation of the theory of autopoietic (“self-making”) systems, which is related to topics that play an important role in the work on “evolutionary management,” the problem of interdisciplinary theory transfer will be addressed. In this context the quite often used concepts of adaptation and evolution are criticized and discussed in the context of biological reductionism. Shifting to issues of direct relevance for business administration, the author then takes up and discusses some aspects of how the theory of autopoietic systems may be used to model social systems.